Cy Twombly and Philip Guston followed very different artistic paths

CY TWOMBLY excites art critics in ways that perhaps no other American abstract artist does. It may be because he is still alive, soon to turn 76; but it is certainly also due to the difficulty of his work and the glow of high cultural seriousness that surrounds it. Critics feel on their mettle before him.

His reputation probably peaked a decade ago, amid the frantic critical and commercial boom surrounding his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but it has declined little. The smaller retrospective of his drawings that has just arrived at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, on its way to London's Serpentine Gallery in April, is only keeping that reputation on the boil.

In a history of post-war art that is neatly gridded into movements and tendencies, Mr Twombly sits quite apart. That doesn't make him unique, of course, as the same could be said of the late Philip Guston, interest in whom has also risen in response to the retrospective of his work that has been touring America in the past few months and is at the Royal Academy of Art until April 12th. The two are enormously different, yet interestingly both were moulded by Abstract Expressionism: Guston made very good and under-rated work in that vein in the 1950s, while Mr Twombly, his junior by 15 years, found his style under its influence. Both later broke with the style, but while Guston's move from abstraction to figuration was doubtless inspired by political feelings (“I got sick and tired of all that purity,” he once said), critics are still arguing over what has fired Mr Twombly's distinctive graphic violence, be it purely stylistic inclinations, his love of ancient classical culture, or even his sexuality. Guston may be enjoying the greater popular acclaim at present, but his retrospective reveals that he is not in the same rank as Mr Twombly.

For many years, however, assessments were very different, certainly in America. Mr Twombly disappeared from the view of most Americans when he left the United States in 1957. He was drawn to Europe after travelling around Spain, Italy and North Africa with his then lover, Robert Rauschenberg. The two shared a studio in Manhattan for a time on their return, but Mr Twombly soon departed once more and settled in Italy where he has been based ever since.

By that time Mr Twombly had found his style, one that diverges distinctively from Abstract Expressionism and almost satirises it. He transformed the assured grandeur of the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning into something much more irritable, sexual and dirty, and he swapped their rich fields of painted colour for the scored, scatological marks of graffiti. Roland Barthes, an intellectual who was just one of Mr Twombly's prominent advocates, once called his approach a “left-handedness”, intending all the suggestions of crookedness that that slur used to have: it aptly sums up Mr Twombly's subversiveness.

There is, however, another version of the artist, the European, the classicist, and it is not surprising to see that this is the aspect the Pompidou has chosen to celebrate. The legends, “Apollo”, “Venus” and “Pan”, are scored hard into the designs of the first large-scale works that open the show, and below them are lists of references trailing off into illegibility. For all the shrill noise of his scrawled marginalia, Mr Twombly's tone can often be very grand and stentorian. It can also have beautiful pitch: the spacious white expanses of his designs somehow redeem his vulgarity, and when he does fill his pictures with colour, it is always with the most voluptuous and vivid of hues.

Which Twombly will be remembered when he is gone is hard to say. Not surprisingly, the man himself is thought to favour the latter assessment, which will no doubt assure him a higher billing in history. But with the likes of Barthes having weighed in for the other side, Mr Twombly may be disappointed.

“Cy Twombly: Drawing on 50” is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, from January 21st-March 29th, and then at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from April 17th-June 13th